Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited. Subject: AgentX WG at 37th IETF, reported by Dale Francisco Agentx WG at 37th IETF, December 9-13, 1996 ------------------------------------------- At the 37th IETF in San Jose, December 9-13, 1996, the SNMP Agent Extensibility Working Group (agentx) met on Wednesday, December 11, 9:00-11:30. The most active participants in the discussion (a few names may have been missed due to confusion on the part of the note-taker) were: Uri Blumenthal, Linda Cabeca, Jeff Case, Dale Francisco, Maria Greene, Jeff Johnson, Deirdre Kostick, Bobby Krupczak, Bob Natale, Dave Perkins, Randy Presuhn, and Don Ryan. About 80 people were present at the meeting. Meeting notes were taken by Dale Francisco, wg editor. AgentX WG Meeting (Wed, December 11, 09:00-11:30) ------------------------------------------------- Working group chair Bob Natale opened the meeting with a statement that he wanted to concentrate first on a review of section 11 ("Questions and Issues") of the most recent protocol draft, and then move on to discussion of implementations and interoperability testing. There was some discussion of 11.1, the decision to proceed with multiple varbinds per AgentX PDU. Jeff Case proposed that we require subagents to be able to accept multiple-varbind PDUs, but not require master agents to emit them. Others felt that only in the case of AgentX GetNext and GetBulk PDUs should the master be allowed to emit fewer than all the relevant varbinds in a single AgentX PDU. The issue was not resolved. The next item to be discussed (11.3) was the decision to remove the value "all contexts" for the context field in the AgentX header. Some felt that by not allowing the possibility of subagents registering for "all contexts", a significant percentage of the market for extensible agents would be unable to use AgentX. It was agreed that there needed to be more discussion on the list of whether registration for "all contexts" is necessary. Several people voiced concerns about how changes in the protocol draft were tracked from version to version. There was a request, agreed to by the chair and the editor, that either a longer rationale section or a separate rationale document be added to explain the motivation behind various design decisions. There was also a request, agreed to by the editor, that instead of posting interim versions of the protocol draft to the mailing list, each new iteration would be submitted as a new internet draft. The question was raised as to whether AgentX was meant to be able to run over a connectionless transport, and if so, how. The consensus was that AgentX is only specified over connection-oriented transports. Several people felt that, though by itself it would not solve the problem of running on a connectionless transport, the idea of a connection or session ID in the AgentX header was a good one. There was a great deal of discussion about index allocation and instance reservation. Many felt that there was insufficient support for multiply-indexed tables in the current protocol draft, and that, in fact, the current index allocation scheme only worked for singly-indexed, arbitrary integer tables. The example was given of a table with two index objects, the first of which is shared. Since indices must be allocated one at a time, it would be impossible for subagent A to get an allocation for, say, "1.2", and subagent B to allocate "1.3". Many people felt that any model that relied on the master agent alone for index allocation was inherently unworkable, since, by design, only the subagent has detailed MIB knowledge. Various solutions were proposed, including a new entity, the "index allocation server"; ad hoc, outside-the-protocol subagent-to-subagent communication; and new AgentX protocol operations that would allow subagents to discover existing indexes and to request arbitrary length (not just single integer valued) index objects. There was also discussion of the unionized registration concept that had been deleted, for lack of a compelling defense, from the most recent protocol draft. It was asked how, without unionized registration, it would be possible to do row creation in tables supported by multiple subagents, where only one of the subagents would be capable of creating a particular row. It became clear, given the intensity of the discussion and the cogency of some of the counterexamples that had been brought forward, that further discussion of the protocol was necessary before general implementation could go forward (though in fact, many of the questions that were raised were the result of initial implementations of the current protocol draft). Deirdre Kostick, NM Area Director, asked that everyone with proposals for changes to the protocol draft post them to the mailing list by a specified time, and that we agree on a date sometime after that for achieving consensus on the protocol. It was agreed that proposed changes to the protocol be posted to the list by January 10, 1977; that we determine final consensus on those issues by February 14; and that a new version of the protocol draft would be submitted to the IETF by February 28.